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Colorist Stephen Nakamura on Creating the Colorful but Naturalistic World of 'Oz the Great and Powerful'

Company 3 colorist Stephen Nakamura talks to Larry Jordan in his Digital Production Buzz podcast about his work on Oz the Great and Powerful.

Says Nakamura about the initial direction he got from director Sam Raimi, "I think the main thing was that [Raimi] wanted to create a different kind of world for Oz and it was going to be a very colorful world that nobody had ever really seen before. So part of the things about the costume design and the lighting and all the visual effects work that was going to get done was to create this world where you just had a lot of chroma everywhere. That can be a little bit tricky because that affects people's skin tones. When we have to put in a lot of chroma in shots, obviously the skin tones become very red and it affects a lot of other things too and color-balancing. So that made it a little bit tricky. But we all worked together really early on and set looks so that at the final product we could get to a grade where you could have a lot of chroma but it still looks very naturalistic."